Wednesday, 28 October 2009

Presidential Basketball

Well, actually - I do a little bit. President Obama is, by all accounts, a really good basketball player. As a non-sporty person myself, I would hate to see, for example, Christina Romer taking time out from her important work saving the US economy to learn how to serve as Presidential point guard. Or, do we imagine that the country might be better off in some inexplicable way if the President would recruit in some WNBA stars to play with?

Obama has signed legislation to guarantee women the right to sue for equal pay. He has doubled the number of women on the Supreme Court (by adding 1. Sigh). He has appointed a strong female Secretary of State. And he is agressively pursuing health care reform that would hugely benefit woman and families. The female Speaker of the House is one of his closest Congressional allies, and he happens to be married to a whip-smart, successful woman and to be raising two confident girls.

Let the guy play b-ball with some friends, for heaven sake. Watching Melody Barnes panting for breath as she darts around after an orange rubber ball wouldn't really seem like much a victory for feminism, to me.

2 comments:

I'm confused. Is it feminist organizations who are complaining about the lack of females on the WH basketball court, or is it news organizations like Politico who have to generate content?

And now today I see the Wapo has a column about the "complaints" about the lack of gender diversity...is this how this works? News orgs bring up a controversy, then other news orgs complain about the special interests who supposedly are whining about said controversy?

Yes, that does seem to be more or less what is happening here. It's lazy journalism - what breaks my heart is to think of all the really good stories on women's issues that aren't being run, while we seem to have inexhaustible time to cover these non-issues. Grr.